The American Dream is a Hollywood lie

End of the dollar hoax? Since 1973, the dollar has been printed paper, not a receipt for anything in the government treasury, not gold, not silver, not even lead or iron. The dollar represents nothing of value today, other than what value buyers and sellers are willing to give it. And they give it less value by the hour. The US dollar was made into a parasitic currency to drain value from everyone in the world who holds it.

The Dollar Dump Begins:

“China, Japan, Belgium, Switzerland and Saudi Arabia Have All Become Big Sellers”

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com

As global financial markets teeter on the edge of collapse, a report published this morning suggests that the run up in the U.S. dollar may be over.

As of today, some 80% of post-Trump election gains have been wiped out and as noted in the special video report from Future Money Trends below, it appears that things are only going to get worse:

China sold more U.S. Treasuries last year than any country has ever sold in a single year… $188 billion worth… Japan is also making an exit, selling nearly $30 billion since election day… Belgium, Switzerland and Saudi Arabia have all become big sellers too…

Official national debt is $20 Trillion… the real debt has been calculated to be $200 Trillion… what’s not included in the official numbers is social security, Medicaid and Medicare obligations… Think about it… every penny spent on the military, welfare programs, foreign aid and even your Congressman’s paycheck…it’s all borrowed money…

As explained in the video report, our creditors know this and they are in the process of dumping their holdings before the whole system collapses in on itself.

The past week has been an immensely clarifying — and profoundly demoralizing — one in American politics. It has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the country's foreign policy establishment, along with its leading center-right and center-left politicians and pundits, are hopelessly, perhaps irredeemably, deluded about the role of the United States in the world.

From the start of the 2016 Republican primaries on down through Donald Trump's surprise electoral college victory, the transition, and the opening months of his administration, members of this foreign policy establishment and these leading politicians and pundits have been united in expressing dismay and alarm about Trump's lack of temperamental and intellectual fitness to serve as commander-in-chief. Yet the moment Trump gave the order to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase used in a chemical weapons attack a few days earlier, all was forgotten and forgiven. Finally Trump became president! Finally he put Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his place! Finally the U.S. showed it had moved beyond former President Barack Obama's reluctance to use military force!

It's hard to know where to begin in formulating a response to this outpouring of delight at the thought of Trump giving the order to launch a barrage of deadly weapons at a sovereign nation over 5,000 miles from American shores. But let's start with absolute basics: Launching even one missile at another country is not, as we euphemistically like to presume, a "military action," a "military operation," or even a "humanitarian intervention." It is an act of war. Full stop. That many countries in the world, including Syria, are far too weak to consider launching a retaliatory counter-attack against the United States for such a bombardment is utterly irrelevant. How would a more powerful country — China, for example — respond if we fired even one cruise missile at its territory? How, for that matter, would we respond if China fired just one at us?

The answer is patently obvious: We would respond furiously, and with complete justification, because it would be an act of war. How people who spend their lives thinking about international affairs can write about America's actions in the world without placing this fact at the center of their analysis is nothing short of astonishing — and a confession that their thinking is really a form of ideological propaganda that places the United States in a different category from every other country in the world. (American exceptionalism might be a relatively salutary civic myth, but it is a myth all the same. It has no business playing a role in the policy recommendations of informed analysts.)

Unconvinced? Then consider another basic fact: The aforementioned foreign policy and centrist establishments were united in considering Obama averse to using American military might. Yet during the eight years of his presidency, Obama bombed at least nine countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, the Central African Republic, and the Philippines.

If that's what "reluctance" to use force looks like, I wonder what it would take for these critics to call someone a warmonger.

What these critics really mean is that Obama didn't embrace a policy of overthrowing governments around the world ("regime change"), and that he didn't think it was a good idea (either for the U.S. domestically or for our relations with the rest of the world) to brag in moralistic terms about our motives in seeking to advance our interests militarily (which Obama mainly did with targeted drone strikes and the selective deployment of special operations forces).

The exception, of course, was in Libya, where three senior members of the foreign policy establishment and the Obama administration (Hillary Clinton, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Susan Rice) persuaded the president to help rebels topple the government of Moammar Gadhafi. When events ended up unfolding like a rerun of the Iraq War's disastrous aftermath in miniature (with its own unique horrors), Obama's instinctual aversion to regime change and moral grandstanding reasserted itself, leading him to resist repeated calls to cripple or overthrow Assad's government in Syria. The president would bomb areas of the country that were controlled by ISIS, but he would not act to remove Assad for fear that the result would lead to even worse consequences than the Syrian civil war itself.

The establishment's reaction has been uniformly negative about that decision, which is a major reason why there was such an outpouring of joy and relief when President Trump reversed course and did what Obama had steadfastly refused to do for over five years: target assets of the Assad government. If there was a criticism to be heard, it was that Trump's missile strike was too limited in scope. Never mind that neither the Trump administration nor any prominent analyst presented a convincing strategy for using American bombs to bring the civil war to a sustainably peaceful conclusion. All that mattered was that the U.S. finally did something, and that this something would continue and expand. "More, please!" — that's what most of the commentary has amounted to.

I'm sorry, but this is madness.

To see why, imagine an alternative history of the American Civil War. In 1861 the southern part of the United States launches an insurrection against the central government and declares its independence. The leader of the central government decides to put it down. The result is several years of bloody conflict that eventually leaves approximately 600,000 people, or 2 percent of the total population, dead (that's about six million people in contemporary terms).

Now imagine there was a country on the other side of the globe in the 1860s that took a keen interest in the conflict and was powerful enough to intervene in the war. The citizens in this country half a world away debate furiously whether to try and "stop the killing" by joining the battle. They have no plan to resolve the underlying issues feeding the violence, but some think it would be desirable to punish the evil deeds committed by one side or the other, or perhaps to punish those who use one kind of weapon or another in prosecuting the war. Some even insist that the case for intervention in the distant conflict is so obvious that the burden of proof should fall on those who oppose it.

In the end, this super-powerful country decides that it makes most sense to pursue "regime change." So it launches an attack that adds to the death toll and eventually leads to the overthrow of the central government, allowing the southern region to prevail.

The point isn't to equate Assad to Abraham Lincoln. Go ahead and imagine the opposite scenario if you wish: Perhaps the moral busybodies on the other side of the planet are less moved by the claim to self-determination asserted by the American South than they are by Lincoln's noble speech at Gettysburg, so instead of pummeling Washington they bombard Richmond and contribute to an easy victory for the North.

The point is that regardless of which side the outside power favors, it has anointed itself the moral arbiter of the world, a position that grants it the authority to mete out justice and punishment to individuals and nations as it sees fit — and this despite the fact that no one elected this power to that ruling position, or even asked the world if it wished to offer its consent.

Every country in the world thinks well of itself. But we're the only country in the world that expects every other country to defer to our self-evident wonderfulness — apparently even when Trump is launching the missiles.

Not every problem in the world has a solution, just as not every injustice in the world is our problem. This has always been the case. But with a reckless, incompetent president prosecuting a foreign policy of "impulse and whim," it has perhaps never been more important to remind ourselves of these truths, and of the pressing need to tame our boundless national self-regard.

More than eight years after Obama's first inaugural address, we still haven't set aside our childish things.

In the near future, the threat of collapse and unraveling social disorder will be so strong that a constant police state presence will be necessary to maintain order and beat back civil unrest.

Our rights, and our civil liberties will be nothing to stand in their way. American citizens have become regarded as ‘potential domestic extremists’ and urban populations will be tightly surveilled and controlled, with frequent check points and a chilling cold atmosphere for free speech and dissent.

A large segment of the population will be tightly investing in the controlling narrative, as they see it as essential to keeping things together. They will make up the base of power for the ruling state, and its diffuse army of snitches and informants.

The paranoid atmosphere will be bad for the economy, and worse for independent economic activities which will virtually cease to exist under biometric, cashless digital transactions, tight transaction and withdraw limits and close financial scrutiny at banks, regulatory agencies and tax authorities.

Rebellion and resentment among the underclasses will grow stronger, and disillusionment will also be high among the general population.

Chaos and violence will be ready to spread, and militarized police and domestic military patrols will become a commonplace nightmare.

The U.S. military is making plans to take over America by 2030. No, this is not another conspiracy theory. Although it easily could be. Nor is it a Hollywood political thriller. Although it certainly has all the makings of a good thriller. No, this is the real deal, coming at us straight from the horse’s mouth. According a Pentagon training video entitled “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” that was created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. military plans to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

John Whitehead wrote about this topic at length, pointing out the chilling fact that the military referred to urban warfare missions as an effort to “drain the swamp.” A restless underclass, roaming gangs, terrorists, loosely-connected bands of hackers and criminal syndicates, along with millions of city dwellers caught up in it.

It is the sad tale that has followed the demise of Middle East hot spots like Baghdad, Mosul, Palestine and Alepplo, in various states of quasi-war where the military will target “extremists” and eliminate them, in even in cases where a large number of non-combatants may reside and end up as collateral damage.

This story is now being transitioned to the cities of America – it may start with riots like in Ferguson. Or it may come in the form of flash martial law declarations to catch a terrorist suspect on the run – like in the Boston Marathon Bombing aftermath. Or it may be a subtle and quiet round-up of dissidents – taken up without resistance by the rest of the community, and taken in on warrants, illegal searches, set-ups and false pretexts.

A chilling time in coming to home to roost in the United States, and the future holds little else but the extreme potential for total violence in major cities, capable of catching up with you, your family or other innocents during catastrophic natural disasters or politically motivated attacks, bombings or riot-demonstrations.

The military will be increasingly prepared to maintain order in the case of economic collapse, widespread unemployment, hunger, looting and angry hordes demanding assistance in the streets.

According to “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. military plans to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems.

What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

The chilling five-minute training video, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints an ominous picture of the future—a future the military is preparing for—bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.

And then comes the kicker.

Three-and-a-half minutes into the Pentagon’s dystopian vision of “a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes — brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers,” the ominous voice of the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”

Drain the swamps.

Surely, we’ve heard that phrase before?

Ah yes.

Emblazoned on t-shirts and signs, shouted at rallies, and used as a rallying cry among Trump supporters, “drain the swamp” became one of Donald Trump’s most-used campaign slogans, along with “build the wall” and “lock her up.”

Funny how quickly the tides can shift and the tables can turn.

You know the future where Judge Dredd takes over – the one where he, and everyone like him, becomes judge, jury and executioner on the spot?

The future doesn’t look pretty for freedom.

Modern society is an incubator for these problems. The risks cannot be avoided in large urban environments, and that is where the most trouble is likely to occur.

Smaller towns and rural areas sometimes often have high crime and police corruption, but many of these areas may still offer a much better buffer from tyranny and dangerous disorder that is an accident just waiting to happen to the right megacity.

Since about 80% of global populations have moved into large cities and urban centers, it is clear that 80% or more of the problems will start or gravitate towards there.

Americans are stuck. Locked into our jobs, rooted where we live, frozen at our income levels. More than at any previous point in our history, we’ve stopped moving — whether moving up the income ladder or packing up a truck and finding another home. We’ve grown ossified, rigid.

The flip side is that we’re stable. If we weren’t so content, we’d be more willing to gamble, to shake things up, to start a new firm or join one. Maybe we’re fine where we are. But maybe this period of stasis cannot last. Maybe it even portends a period of massive disruption.

In “The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream,” economist Tyler Cowen presents an X-ray of societal sclerosis. This isn’t merely another exercise in nostalgia, a sentimental yearning for a bygone era (when, for instance, crime and pollution were higher, people were highly likely to marry someone who lived within five blocks and you would buy an album containing 10 lousy songs because you liked one track). Something has changed in the American character and in the American economy, and the two seem to be reinforcing each other.

For instance, parts of the country (New York City, Silicon Valley, Texas) are doing extremely well, yet able-bodied adults sit idle in other areas. Why don’t the unemployed, and the large numbers who have dropped out of the labor force, move to the boom towns? Wouldn’t it be better to drive an Uber in Brooklyn than to get by on welfare in West Virginia?

Yet labor mobility is in a funk. Especially after WWII, millions of Americans with limited resources — southern blacks — moved hundreds of miles from home to take up industrial jobs in the north. At the peak, more than 30 percent of southern-born blacks moved north, from 1920 through the 1960s. Even when technological limitations made long-distance travel extremely onerous, in the late 19 century, we were willing to travel in search of opportunity. In the second half of the 1800s, more than two-thirds of US men over 30 had moved away from their hometowns, and more than a third of those moves were for more than 100 miles.

Nowadays, moving from one state to another has dropped 51 percent from its average in the postwar years, and that number has been decreasing for more than 30 years. Black Americans, once especially adventurous, are now especially immobile. A survey of blacks born between 1952 and 1982 found that 69 percent had remained in the same county and 82 percent stayed in the same state where they were born.

This is especially troubling in context: Studies show major benefits for the children of poor people who move to better-off neighborhoods via, for instance, a program called Moving to Opportunity. If a poor child from a bad neighborhood moved to a middle-class neighborhood at age 8, his expected lifetime income would be $302,000 higher than if he stayed put. Still, the bias toward inertia is so strong that 52 percent of impoverished black families told about Moving to Opportunity declined offers to participate.

One reason people don’t move where the jobs are is because of real-estate prices — which in turn are kept at high levels by regulatory restrictions and NIMBY-ism. In New York City in the 1950s a typical apartment rented for $60 a month, or $530 today if you adjust for inflation. Two researchers found that if you reduced regulations for building new homes in places like New York and San Francisco to the median level, the resulting expanded workforce would increase US GDP by $1.7 trillion. That won’t happen, though: More homes would diminish the property values of existing homeowners.

When we lose the ability to pay for stuff, the poorest and least powerful will be the first and worst hurt.

That locked-in syndrome is a factor in economic stagnation, too: A recent Wells Fargo survey found that white-collar office productivity growth was zero. As the economy was supposedly recovering from the financial crisis, from 2009 to 2014, American median wages fell 4 percent. Men’s median incomes today are actually below 1969 levels. Had we retained our pre-1973 rates of productivity growth, the typical household would earn about $30,000 a year more than it does.

Despite all the hype attached to a few tech companies, far fewer companies are being formed than in the 1980s, and fewer Americans are working for startups. Such new companies are linked with rapid job creation. We’re coming close, Cowen says, to realizing the 1950s cliche (not really true then) of everyone clinging to a job at a handful of huge, soul-crushing companies.

So where is all this heading? “Ultimately peace and stability must be paid for,” writes Cowen. Sluggish growth, diminished productivity, unwillingness to move to a better job and fewer entrepreneurs taking risks to create fortunes adds up to less tax revenue. When we lose the ability to pay for stuff, the poorest and least powerful will be the first and worst hurt. They won’t like it.

The social, economic and political disruption represented by the ascent of President Trump is one of the early warning signs, Cowen says, that the tectonic plates of our society are rumbling. When they start to move, a lot of complacency will be destroyed in the quake.

As with most Western countries, collecting tax from an unwilling population is a deadly serious game for all levels of government, and unlike most other countries, America has many levels of very greedy government:

1. Local city governments;

2. Regional country governments;

3. District agency governments;

4. State governments;

5. Federal governments; and,

6. UN fiat-government.

They are so greedy that most of their employees are paid far more than they could earn in private sector jobs, and unlike the private sector where few have company pensions these days, government pensions are nearly as high as the final salary level.

The "IRS" (Internal Revenue Service) is a tax collecting agency for the federal government, it is also a terrorist group that uses the media to terrorize citizens into paying all their taxes and then some. They are terrorists because they employ terror as their weapon of choice to gain compliance from the population. Pay them or your life is ruined forever. Nice choice. But some can't pay. Not everyone in America can pay half their income or more and survive. Many citizens have to choose either eating or paying taxes, or choose between paying local taxes or federal taxes. They just don't have enough money to pay every government agency the taxes demanded.

Except for the UN, all other government agencies levy taxes as if they were the only taxing authority, so the total of all taxes sometimes adds up to more than 100% of everything you own. And those tax bills collect interest compounded at absurdly high rates, so that the final tax demanded could be anything from 100% to 10,000% more than what a citizen owns. This is "TAX TERRORISM". This leads to what happened in this next story....

IRS ‘drains’ Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott’s bank accounts

Apparently being the daughter of a multimillionaire media tycoon isn’t enough to save you from financial dire straits.

Page Six has learned that the IRS has emptied bank accounts belonging to late TV mogul Aaron Spelling’s daughter Tori Spelling and her husband, Dean McDermott.

In July 2016, it was reported that the couple — who had their fifth child in March — were slammed with a federal tax lien for $707,487.30 in unpaid federal taxes for their 2014 bill alone.

Meanwhile, Page Six reported that McDermott’s ex-wife, Mary Jo Eustace, is threatening him with jail over unpaid child support for their 18-year-old son, Jack. During a court hearing over the child support in March, McDermott told a judge that he had “fallen on hard times.”

And their struggles don’t stop there. In November 2016, “Entertainment Tonight” reported that the couple were also being sued by American Express over an unpaid credit-card balance of $87,595.55 and had been sued by the same company earlier in the year over a $37,981.97 bill.

We also reported back in November that Tori — who shot to fame in the ’90s when she starred on dad Aaron’s “Beverly Hills 90210” and has since forged a career as a reality star and author — hoped to parlay her latest pregnancy into another reality series that would frame her as a Martha Stewart-like domestic goddess. And that she hoped she could “make some real money going forward.”

Last year, Tori dismissed reports of financial woes to People, saying rumors of money problems began after she wrote her 2013 book, “Spelling It Like It Is.” “It was one chapter. I thought I was being relatable, talking about how celebrities go through financial struggles, too.”

In the book she wrote, “It’s no mystery why I have money problems. I grew up rich beyond anyone’s dreams. Even when I try to embrace a simpler lifestyle, I can’t seem to let go of my ­expensive tastes.”

Beaverton, Oregon, resident Mats Järlström – a Swedish-born electronics engineer by training and previous work experience – is $500 poorer after being fined by an Oregon agency following his attempt to point out a problem in the state’s traffic lights that “puts the public at risk.”

Specifically, Järlström – after spending a year investigating the timing of yellow lights and red-light camera statistics – found people were being electronically captured running yellow lights because of misapplication of a timing formula developed in 1959 and still used internationally.

“They only looked at a vehicle traveling safely directly through an intersection, however the equation they developed is not used for turning lanes,” Järlström told Motherboard. “When you make a turn you slow down, but that’s not accounted for in their solution, so people are getting caught in red-light cameras for making safe turns.”

Armed with a year’s worth of data, Järlström presented his findings to various groups, including the local sheriff – his wife’s earlier red-light ticket having sparked his quest – “60 Minutes” and Alexei Maradudin, the last surviving author of the 1959 paper still used to time traffic lights.

“He wants me to continue with this, it’s amazing that I have his support,” Järlström said.

Järlström was even invited to make a presentation to the Institute of Transportation Engineers in Anaheim, California.

So, confident he had found a problem that needed to be addressed, Järlström bundled up his research and contacted Oregon’s engineering board.

“I would like to present these facts for your review and comments,” he wrote in a September 2104 letter. Järlström also noted his technical background in the letter, saying, “I’m an engineer.”

That proved to be a big mistake.

It wasn’t his research that interested the state – it was his referencing himself as an “engineer.”

“ORS 672.020(1) prohibits the practice of engineering in Oregon without registration … at a minimum, your use of the title ‘electronics engineer’ and the statement ‘I’m an engineer’ … create violations,” read the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying response.

In the two years that followed, Järlström – who is not licensed as an engineer in Oregon – was accused of misrepresenting himself, and his year of collecting data – on his own time, free of charge – characterized as possibly having “engaged in unlicensed engineering work in Oregon.”

According to the National Council of Examiners of Engineering and Surveying, there were 481,717 licensed engineers in the U.S. in 2016, but about 2 million people actually practice engineering, according to the National Society of Professional Engineers. Even Oregon State University’s 45 faculty members of the Civil and Construction Engineering department only has 13 members who have engineering licenses, reported KOIN News.

“I’m not practicing engineering, I’m just using basic mathematics and physics, Newtonian laws of motion, to make calculations and talk about what I found,” Järlström said.

The board insisted the citizen-engineer was legally prohibited from publishing or presenting his findings.

“I have stated I was a Swedish electronics engineer, but I based all the things from freedom of speech. I was just talking. That’s literally what I did,” Järlström said.

The board’s Law Enforcement Committee assessed Järlström a fine of $500, which he paid in November. But this week Järlström struck back, filing suit with the help of the Institute for Justice, arguing Oregon cannot own the word engineer.

“Anyone should be able to talk about the traffic signals – if they’re too long or too short or anything – without being penalized,” said Järlström.

“People like Mats aren’t designing bridges. They’re talking, and the state is punishing them for that,” said attorney Sam Gedge.

“And it’s not just Mats. Oregon’s engineering board fined an activist for publicly criticizing a power plant. They fined a retired guy who wrote to complain about home water damage. It’s even launched an investigation based on a political ad. This is a major First Amendment problem,” Gedge added.

“Under the First Amendment, you don’t need to be a licensed lawyer to write an article critical of a Supreme Court decision, you don’t need to be a licensed landscape architect to create a gardening blog, and you don’t need to be a licensed engineer to talk about traffic lights. Whether or not you use math, criticizing the government is a core constitutional right that cannot be hampered by onerous licensing requirements.”

The legal group is representing Järlström at no charge and seeking no monetary damages.

Money is the basic issue in Oregon - that government fraudulently does not want revenue from traffic fines reduced by anyone proving their traffic light timing is designed to trap motorists and force them to pay fines. Lawyers should always sue for damages when the fraud involves public money. What this case proves is a government conspiracy against the citizens, something most governments do eventually to enrich themselves. More money taken in means higher pay and bonuses for state employees, so they have a huge incentive to cheat, lie, and defraud the public by enacting laws and regulations requiring everyone to pay them money, because eventually, everyone gets caught by a red light camera sometime. They are set up that way. If you are in the intersection when the light turns red, or even yellow, the camera is activated no matter whether you are turning left or even stalled in traffic.

Such a country could hardly be called a "free" country. It is a corrupt country that once was free but no longer.

“Policing is broken… It has evolved as a paramilitary, bureaucratic, organizational arrangement that distances police officers from the communities they’ve been sworn to protect and serve. When we have shooting after shooting after shooting that most people would define as at least questionable, it’s time to look, not just at a few bad apples, but the barrel. And I’m convinced that it is the barrel that is rotted.”— Norm Stamper, former Seattle police chief

Please.

Somebody give Attorney General Jeff Sessions a copy of the Constitution.

And while you’re at it, get a copy to President Trump, too.

In fact, you might want to share a copy with the nation’s police officers, as well.

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I have my doubts that any of these individuals—all of whom swore to uphold and defend the Constitution—have ever read any of the nation’s founding documents.

Had they actually read and understood the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, there would be no militarized police, no mass surveillance, no police shootings of unarmed individuals, no SWAT team raids, no tasering of children, no asset forfeiture schemes or any of the other government-sanctioned abuses that get passed off as law and order these days.

We’ve got serious problems in this country, and they won’t be solved on the golf course, by wining and dining corporate CEOs, giving local police forces more military equipment, locking down the nation, or pretending that the only threats to our freedoms are posed by forces beyond our borders or by “anti-government” extremists hiding among us. Battlefield America: T... John W. Whitehead Best Price: $10.79 Buy New $15.49

So far, Trump’s first 100 days in office have been no different from Obama’s last 100 days, at least when it comes to the government’s ongoing war on our freedoms.

Government corruption remains at an all-time high.

Police shootings and misconduct have continued unabated.

The nation’s endless wars continue to push us to the brink of financial ruin.

And “we the people” are still being treated as if we have no rights, are entitled to no protections, and exist solely for the purpose of sustaining the American police state with our hard-earned tax dollars.

Just take the policing crisis in this country, for instance.

Sessions—the chief lawyer for the government and the head of the Justice Department, which is entrusted with ensuring that the nation’s laws are faithfully carried out and holding government officials accountable to abiding by their oaths of office to “uphold and defend the Constitution”—doesn’t think we’ve got a policing problem in America.

In fact, Sessions thinks the police are doing a great job (apart from “the individual misdeeds of bad actors,” that is).

For that matter, so does Trump.

Really, really great.

Indeed, Sessions thinks the nation’s police forces are doing such a great job that they should be rewarded with more military toys (weapons, gear, equipment) and less oversight by the Justice Department.

As for Trump, he believes “the dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America is wrong” and has vowed to “end it.”

Excuse me for a moment while I flush what remains of the Constitution down the toilet.

Clearly, Trump has not been briefed on the fact that it has never been safer to be a cop in America. According to Newsweek, “it’s safer to be a cop than it is to simply live in many U.S. cities… It’s safer to be a cop than it is to live in Baltimore. It’s safer to be a cop than it is to be a fisher, logger, pilot, roofer, miner, trucker or taxi driver. It’s safer to be a cop today than it’s been in years, decades, or even a century, by some measures.”

You know what’s dangerous?

Being a citizen of the American police state.

Treating cops as deserving of greater protections than their fellow citizens.

And training cops to think and act like they’re soldiers on a battlefield.

As journalist Daniel Bier warns, “If you tell cops over and over that they’re in a war, they’re under siege, they’re under attack, and that citizens are the enemy—instead of the people they’re supposed to protect—you’re going to create an atmosphere of fear, tension, and hostility that can only end badly, as it has for so many people.”

Frankly, if there’s a war taking place in this country, it’s a war on the American people.

After all, we’re the ones being shot at and tasered and tracked and beaten and intimidated and threatened and invaded and probed.

And what is the government doing to fix this policing crisis that threatens the safety of every man, woman and child in this country?

Not a damn thing.

Incredibly, according to a study by the American Medical Association, police-inflicted injuries send more than 50,000 Americans to hospital emergency rooms every year.

Yet as Slate warns, if you even dare to criticize a police officer let alone challenge the myth of the hero cop—a myth “used to legitimize brutality as necessary, justify policies that favor the police, and punish anyone who dares to question police tactics or oppose the unions’ agendas”— you will be roundly denounced “as disloyal, un-American, and dangerous.”

As reporter David Feige concludes, “We should appreciate the value and sacrifice of those who choose to serve and protect. But that appreciation should not constitute a get-out-of-jail-free card for the vast army of 800,000 people granted general arrest powers and increasingly armed with automatic weapons and armored vehicles.”

Vast army.

Equipped with deadly weapons.

Empowered with arrest powers.

Immune from accountability for wrongdoing.

What is this, Hitler’s America?

Have we strayed so far from our revolutionary roots that we no longer even recognize tyranny when it’s staring us in the face?

The fact that police are choosing to fatally resolve encounters with their fellow citizens by using their guns speaks volumes about what is wrong with policing in America today, where police officers are being dressed in the trappings of war, drilled in the deadly art of combat, and trained to look upon “every individual they interact with as an armed threat and every situation as a deadly force encounter in the making.”

Mind you, the federal government is the one responsible for turning our police into extensions of the military, having previously distributed billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment to local police agencies, including high-powered weapons, assault vehicles, drones, tactical gear, body armor, weapon scopes, infrared imaging systems and night-vision goggles—equipment intended for use on the battlefield—not to mention federal grants for militarized training and SWAT teams.

Thus, despite what Attorney General Sessions wants you to believe, the daily shootings, beatings and roadside strip searches (in some cases, rape) of American citizens by police are not isolated incidents.

Likewise, the events of recent years are not random occurrences: the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers.

Rather, these developments are all part of a concerted effort to destabilize the country, institute de facto martial law disguised as law and order, and shift us fully into the iron jaws of the police state.

So, no, the dramatic increase in police shootings are not accidents.

It wasn’t an “accident” that 26-year-old Andrew Lee Scott, who had committed no crime, was gunned down by police who knocked aggressively on the wrong door at 1:30 am, failed to identify themselves as police, and then repeatedly shot and killed Scott when he answered the door while holding a gun in self-defense. Police were investigating a speeding incident by engaging in a middle-of-the-night “knock and talk” in Scott’s apartment complex.

It wasn’t an “accident” when Levar Edward Jones was shot by a South Carolina police officer during a routine traffic stop over a seatbelt violation as he was in the process of reaching for his license and registration. The trooper justified his shooting of the unarmed man by insisting that Jones reached for his license “aggressively.”

It wasn’t an “accident” when Francisco Serna, a 73-year-old grandfather with early-stage dementia, was shot and killed by police for refusing to remove his hand from his pocket. Police were investigating an uncorroborated report that Serna had a gun, but it turned out he was holding a crucifix and made no aggressive movements before he was gunned down.

It wasn’t an “accident” when Nandi Cain, Jr., was thrown to the ground, choked and punched over a dozen times by a police officer after the officer stopped Cain for jaywalking. Cain made no aggressive moves toward the officer, and had even removed his jacket to show the officer he had no weapon.

It wasn’t an “accident” when 65-year-old Thomas Smith, suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, called 911 because of a medical problem only to have his home raided by a SWAT team. Smith was thrown to the ground and placed in handcuffs because his condition prevented him from following police instructions.

It wasn’t an “accident” when John Wrana, a 95-year-old World War II veteran, died after being shot multiple times by a police officer with a Mossberg shotgun during a raid at Wrana’s room at an assisted living center. This, despite the fact that there were five police officers on the scene to subdue Wrana, who used a walker to get around and was “armed” with a shoehorn and not a knife, as police assumed.

It wasn’t an “accident” when a 10-year-old boy was subdued by two police officers using a taser because the child became unruly at the day care center he attended.

It wasn’t an “accident” when police in South Dakota routinely subjected persons, some as young as 3 years old, to catheterizations in order to forcibly obtain urine samples.

It wasn’t an “accident” when Charles Kinsey, a behavioral therapist, was shot by police as he was trying to help an autistic patient who had wandered away from his group home and was sitting in the middle of the road playing with a toy car. The officer who shot Kinsey was reportedly told that neither Kinsey nor the patient had a weapon.

It wasn’t an “accident” when Frank Arnal Baker was mauled by a police dog and kicked by an officer for not complying quickly enough with a police order. Baker, who had done nothing wrong, spent two weeks in the hospital with fractured ribs and collapsed lungs and needed skin grafts for the dog-bite injuries.

No, none of these incidents were accidents.

Nor are they isolated, anecdotal examples of a few bad actors, as Sessions insists.

Far from being isolated or anecdotal, police misconduct cases have become so prevalent as to jeopardize the integrity of all of the nation’s law enforcement agencies.

Unfortunately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is what happens when you allow so-called “law and order” to matter more than justice: corruption flourishes, injustice reigns and tyranny takes hold.

Yet no matter what Trump and Session seem to believe, nowhere in the Constitution does it say that Americans must obey the government.

Despite the corruption of Congress and the complicity of the courts, nowhere does the Constitution require absolute subservience to the government’s dictates.

And despite what most police officers seem to believe, nowhere does the Constitution state that Americans must comply with a police order.

To suggest otherwise is authoritarianism.

This is also, as abolitionist Frederick Douglass noted, the definition of slavery:“I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted.”

You want to know what it means to be a slave in the American police state?

It means being obedient, compliant and Sieg Heil!-ing every government agent armed with a weapon. If you believe otherwise, try standing up for your rights, being vocal about your freedoms, or just challenging a government dictate, and see how long you last before you’re staring down the barrel of a loaded government-issued gun.

"The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work. or you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." – The Matrix

It seems the level and intensity of the propaganda campaigns has ratcheted up dramatically in the last half dozen years and appears to be reaching a crescendo as we speak. It’s almost as if the Deep State is frantically trying to maintain the status quo, even as the worldwide financial Ponzi scheme of debt approaches the point of collapse. The domestic conditions in Europe, North America, and Asia are deteriorating rapidly. The propaganda doled out trying to convince citizens their financial situation is not worsening has failed.

The people realize they have been screwed and continue to be screwed by the politicians, bankers and corporate fascists running the show. This is the major reason Trump was elected. People were desperate for someone who offered them a promise of economic revival and reduced government interference in their lives.

The problem is no one is capable of saving the US Titanic. The iceberg was struck sixteen years ago when the Deep State engineered a plundering campaign driving the national debt from $5.8 trillion to $20 trillion, and unfunded welfare liabilities to $200 trillion. Unpaid for tax cuts will not save us. Unpaid for shovel ready infrastructure projects will not save us. Threatening foreign countries with tariffs will not bring manufacturing jobs back. Excessively low-interest rates will not spur investment, but it will create a pension crisis and impoverish senior citizens.

Devaluing your currency when every country in the world attempts the same “solution” will not work. Passing an Obamacare lite healthcare plan that keeps mega-corporation insurance companies and hospitals in charge solves nothing. The demographic time bomb of boomers turning 65 cannot be reversed. Providing the appearance of normalcy and improvement by artificially boosting the stock and real estate markets to all-time bubble highs only makes the coming crash that much more devastating.

It is clearly evident to me the drumbeat of war is louder than it has been in decades as this Fourth Turning enters its ninth year. Every previous U.S. Fourth Turning has climaxed with a more horrific war than the previous, as the technological “advances” allow the Deep Statecontrollers to create cannon fodder more efficiently. The year 2011 seems to have been the nexus for the Deep State to create new enemies and sow the seeds of discontent and revolution around the globe. U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq in 2011, while troop levels in Afghanistan remained low.

The neo-cons were running out of conflicts to keep the profits flowing. The U.S. economy was headed back into recession as the temporary effects of the Fed’s QE heroin injection and Obama’s massive porkulus plan were leading to the inevitable drug withdrawal and fall back into recession. The Deep State managers had to act fast. They needed new enemies, more wars and more QE.

Was it just a coincidence Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in Egypt during 2011 while the U.S. stood by and did nothing?

After the democratically elected replacement turned out to be a Muslim extremist, we fully supported the next coup which placed a military dictator in charge. He just got a grand welcome from Trump a few weeks ago. I guess military dictators are OK when they do what we say.

A dictator who had the nerve to not honor the U.S. dollar as the currency of choice in his kingdom, Muammar Gaddafi, was swiftly overthrown and killed by a NATO force led by the U.S. in 2011.A stable country was turned into a terrorist haven overnight. It’s now a lawless hellhole inhabited by ISIS, Al Qaeda, and various other Muslim terrorist factions. Along with the vacuum left in Iraq, Libya became a breeding ground for terrorists, armed by the U.S.

Shockingly, after decades of stability, factions within Syria began a civil war against Assad and his government in 2011. Do you see a connection yet?

Just as U.S. military presence in the Middle East began to wane, all hell began breaking out across the region. McCain and his band of neo-con world changers helped arm the “moderate rebels” fighting against the suddenly evil Assad. These moderates became ISIS, who now suddenly became the new bogeyman to be feared by Americans, as professionally produced videos of beheadings and other atrocities began to be disseminated by the mainstream media.

The War on Terror had a new jolt of gusto and increased funding for more military miss-adventures.

The propagandists ignored the inconvenient fact Assad was fighting against ISIS and Al Qaeda. They ignored the fact Assad ruled over a secular country – not a country run by religious American hating Muslim zealots. Fighting against Assad and ISIS doubled the arms dealers’ profits.

Then Russia threw a monkey wrench into the Deep State plans.

They fully supported Assad as an ally because they need his ports. The real reason Assad was attacked was because Saudi Arabia and Qatar need to build their natural gas pipeline across Syria to reach Europe. Virtually all of Europe is dependent upon Russia to supply their natural gas. The Deep State’s retaliation for Putin’s support of Assad was to overthrow the democratically elected president of the Ukraine who had rejected NATO for a closer partnership with Russia. The U.S. instigated coup and installation of a subservient puppet led Putin to put Crimea under Russian control and support Ukrainian rebels as they fought the new regime. This dramatic increase in tensions between NATO and Russia again generated more profits for the military industrial complex. Missiles and troops are pouring into the NATO countries surrounding Russia.

American propaganda specialists now had their new enemies.

Syria and Russia, with Iran and North Korea providing occasional fear mongering diversions, became the focus of the neo-cons and their pliant media mouthpieces. The false flag downing of a Malaysian airliner over the Ukraine was blamed on Putin and Russia. No radar proof or physical evidence was ever presented implicating the Ukrainian rebels. They were winning the civil war and the U.S./NATO needed to turn world opinion against Putin.

The first attempt at a false flag gas attack in Syria occurred in 2013, as the U.S. backed rebels murdered over 500 innocent victims in an attempt to turn world opinion against Assad and provoke NATO involvement on par with Libya. When this atrocity propaganda failed to work, the Deep State turned to heartstring pulling photographs of dead and injured children, with a consistent narrative spewed by every media pundit as instructed by the controllers.

The first atrocity propaganda photo was in 2015, functioning as twofer on the propaganda scale. The picture of a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned when his boat from Turkey to Greece capsized was spread across the world on every media outlet for a week as faux outrage against Assad and Putin was ramped up to hysterical levels. The evil Assad had caused this refugee crisis, even though it was the (CIA-sponsored) rebels who started the war.

The blame for this tragic death was solely due to his father’s recklessness. The entire family lived in Turkey for three years and was not forced to go to Europe. The father was being funded from a relative in Canada and wanted to go to Europe for dental work. The picture was also used to promote the continued Muslim invasion of Europe. How could Europeans turn away these nice people? George Soros’ master plan was working perfectly.

A year later Aleppo boy was the latest atrocity photo used to reverse public opinion against Assad and Putin, as their military success against ISIS, Al Qaeda and the U.S. supported rebels endangered the Deep Stateplan.

As usual, the American public swallowed the propaganda, hook, line and sinker.

The picture suddenly appeared and was disseminated on every mainstream media outlet in the country for days, with pontificating pundits tearfully portraying Assad as a butcher. No context, no proof he was injured by government forces and no proof it wasn’t just a staged photo op like previous attempts. This last-ditch attempt to convince the world to support a Syrian invasion also failed. This atrocity propaganda game loses its impact on a video game addicted, ADD-ridden, SJW populace fairly quickly.Private citizen Donald Trump was unequivocal in his opposition to Syrian intervention before being elevated to the presidency, as shown in these tweets:

Many Syrian ‘rebels’ are radical Jihadis. Not our friends & supporting them doesn’t serve our national interest. Stay out of Syria!

Don’t attack Syria – an attack that will bring nothing but trouble for the U.S. Focus on making our country strong and great again!

Trump’s non-interventionist rhetoric regarding Syria and unwillingness to declare Putin an evil enemy of America during the campaign resulted in an all-out assault by the Deep State to derail his candidacy, falsely claiming he was a puppet of Russia.

These unsubstantiated claims and vitriolic propaganda campaign against Trump to elect Deep State candidate of choice – crooked Hillary – led to a heroic effort by the alternate media across the internet countering the mainstream media propaganda with facts and reason.

When the corporate media shills rolled out the “fake news” storyline to discredit the alternate truth telling media, it immediately blew up in their faces, as the majority of the public began to realize the fake news was being plied by CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and the rest of the captured corporate legacy media.

The discontent with the status quo among the normal people in flyover America was so great, it overcame all the Deep State propaganda, fake news, vast sums of money behind Clinton, and liberal urban strongholds, to elect Donald Trump as an agent of change who would kick the bums out of Washington. The undermining of Trump’s presidency began before he took office as the propaganda machine kicked into overdrive, with non-stop media squawking about Russia hacking the U.S. election in favor of Trump.

There were no facts, no evidence, no substance, but plenty of innuendo, plenty of unfounded accusations, and fake news reports at afanatical level by faux journalists being paid millions to do their part. Putin as an evil manipulator, controlling Trump, was the meme flogged 24 hours a day by the Deep State to keep Trump on the defensive.

The only question at this point is whether Trump has already been co-opted by the Deep State military industrial complex or whether he is being manipulated through false flags and traditional propaganda techniques. Based on the slow progress on his domestic agenda of immigration reform, Obamacare repeal, tax cuts, infrastructure spending, and trade reform, it appears Trump decided to take the advice of neo-cons within and outside his administration and distract the masses with some new military adventurism.

The relentless pounding of the Russian hacking narrative put Trump on the defensive. As Syria and Russia were on the verge of crushing the ISIS/Al Qaeda/“moderate rebel” resistance, a new false flag was needed. As McArthur so accurately described seven decades ago, the incessant propaganda of fear is what enriches the military industrial complex.

“Our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.” – General Douglas McArthur

We cannot even live on a piece of landwithout being coerced by government to earn some money in order to pay the property taxes. But we have to earn more than the amount owed in property taxes because we are taxed on our earnings as well. We are taxed on the vehicle and gas that gets us to work, which require more work to pay off–earnings, again, that must go above and beyond what we need because it will be taxed.

Could this be the overlooked factor that makes America more violent than some other developed nations?

Has the American government piled so many laws, regulations, and statutes on top of each other that American citizens can’t just go through life without being told perfectly normal, non-violent behavior is wrong?

I think this highlights the problem with mass shootings that many have been pointing out. Whoever the shooters feel they are being oppressed by, they are correctly identifying that they are being coerced. Of course, their response is insane, and probably related to the drugs they take (some of which we also give kids), but there would never be a need for drugs if a coercive society had not reared them.

The hopelessness felt when being forced to spend money, behave a certain way, or not do something you want to do, is one of those gut wrenching deep feelings of despair that grow inside some people until they burst.

But now imagine that the government has taken everything from you.

Imagine if they took your car as a civil asset forfeiture? What if your tax burden is 50%? What if you give up on that business you want to start because of the pile of paperwork and extra costs required by the government?

What if they take your kids because they are home schooled, or shoot your dog for no reason whatsoever? All these things happen, unfortunately relatively regularly, in America.

Many of us are baffled by why someone would become a terrorist, especially a suicide bomber. Again, this is the coercion the Middle East is smothered in by the USA.

Imagine losing your childhood because you could not go outside because of the American drones. Imagine family members having been murdered by laughing soldiers. Imagine all your hopes and dreams bombed away in the blink of an eye. Again, this is the unfortunate reality for many people today.

In the 1970s, prior to the domination of the biopsychiatry-Big Pharma partnership, many mental health professionals took seriously the impact of coercion and resentful relationships on mental health. And in a cultural climate more favorable than our current one for critical reflection of society, authors such as Erich Fromm, who addressed the relationship between society and mental health, were taken seriously even within popular culture. But then psychiatry went to bed with Big Pharma and its Big Money, and their partnership has helped bury the common sense reality that an extremely coercive society creates enormous fear and resentment, which results in miserable marriages, unhappy families, and severe emotional and behavioral problems.

I do of course blame Congress most of all. They are swine. They only care about their own careers. Who knows how much of it is corruption and how much of it is pure stupidity. People should start sending Paul Ryan bricks to indicate how much we want the wall.

They (Congress) are the opposition party to Donald Trump. This is really something we’ve never seen before. The president stands alone, it’s his own political party, he’s Gary Cooper. All we have is millions of Americans behind him, but he doesn’t have anybody in Washington behind him.

The recent discovery, still unconfirmed, is a signal to me that our generals McMaster and Mattis, are preparing for full scale an invasion of Syria.

How do I know?
Whenever America initiates a war in some foreign country, there usually arises a causa belli, a reason for that particular war. This time around it is innocent children being killed as well as anti-Syrian combatants being tortured and then incinerated in hide-a-way mystery.

Next we will hear that Americans have to fight for “moral justice” [CIA claptrap].

We know when LBJ falsely informed the American public that our navy had been attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats, our legislators immediately voted a complete falsehood [north Vietnam never attacked us] into legislation justifying our subsequent incursion into Vietnam. That legislation, a mark of legislative disgrace, had been sanctified as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Subsequently, fifty thousand American soldiers died needlessly and 250,000 were wounded. No one was sent to jail for this act of treason against the American public and the world.

Ironically, one upstart general named McMaster wrote his PhD thesis on the totality of generals who committed a Dereliction of Duty by sending our draftees into Harm’s Way. McMaster claims the generals did this for personal gain, fame and fortune. Maybe this guy McMaster should go back and re-read his own thesis.

Since the Vietnam War, our generals/admirals have sent us into countless meaningless lethal wars where we have needlessly killed or maimed thousands of our soldiers. At the same time, we injured and displaced millions of refugees from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, et. al.

We are a ‘warmongering’ nation led by draft-dodging POTUSs [Clinton, Bush Jr, Obama] and overwhelmed by generals who have no concept of effective, strategic warfare other than to initiate an invasion and pray that it all works out. Let’s not forget our legislators that are bought and sold by weapons manufacturers.

So now we have this fifteen year war against the so-called nefarious Taliban. Remember when POTUS Reagan invited them to the White House!? Don’t forget that the CIA constructed Al Qaeda/ISIS to be the new ‘boogey man’ in our ersatz War Against Terrorism [oxymoron]. This “War of Terror’ was brought to us by the clever team of CIA/MI/ Bush Jr/Cheney. These wackos produced the “mother of all false flags 9/11” to get the boys/girls juiced for fighting to save our country. What a crock!

Some years back, I first visited Syria on behalf of one of our more intelligent generals [Keith Alexander, Director of G2]. I reported back to my colleagues that there was no reason to decapitate the Syrian regime and subsequently neutralize ‘Dr. Bashar Assad’. Moreover, I had reiterated that Bashar was protecting the minority Druze, Christians, Alawites and Jews remaining in a predominantly Sunni Muslim country.

The rest is history.

Now, our incompetent new Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R. Hailey, has misspoken and embarrassed our State Department by falsely claiming that Bashar Assad has burned thousands of anti-Syrian combatants in a fake crematorium. She is an instrument for the Military Industrial Machine, a tool.

Next, Sec Def. James Mattis has sent over six thousand additional troops into Syria [not including another six thousand into Iraq] along with heavy weapons to initiate a military offensive against Bashar Assad and his well-trained Syrian soldiers.

Our “Doll House” advisor, Ivanka Trump, bemoaned the presence of slaughtered children gassed by Bashar. Unfortunately, she did not want to admit that this fiction had not occurred.

So we have a multiplicity of contrived, incorrect statements, and inept actions which are culminating into one strategic end: eliminate Bashar Assad’s regime.

Easier said than done!

Starting another full scale war which we are not able to effectively fight [witness both Iraq and Afghanistan] will lead to the intervention of war –wearied Hezbollah fighters [about 8000 highly-trained Lebanese combatants]. Alongside these seven year battle-tested combatants will be the Iran Revolutionary Guard [IRG] and Russian Special Forces which will brook no leniency whatsoever against our poorly trained/ill-equipped desert soldiers.

This impending Syrian incursion will be as close to a WWIII scenario as one can imagine. It will involve so many terrorist groups fighting alongside US and allied forces that it would take a very sophisticated battle field commander to know what, where, how, and when this amalgam of incompetency could achieve any modicum of success.

REMEMBER: We have no national security interest in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, or Africa.

We simply feed the voracious appetite of KBR, Halliburton, L3, SAIC, and many other military industrial companies by offering up our children to become their eventual cannon fodder.

House Seeks Security Upgrades at Members' Offices Back HomeThe U.S. House's Sergeant-at-Arms is seeking at least $2 million to increase security at Congress members' offices in their home districts, the News4 I-Team has learned.

The security upgrades include panic buttons for offices that don't already have them and video surveillance equipment.

A growing number of House Republicans are facing physical threats from angry constituents in their districts, leading many to fear for their safety.

In the last few weeks alone, the FBI arrested a man threatening Rep. Martha McSally's (Ariz.) life; a woman pursued Rep. David Kustoff (Tenn.) with her car, and Rep. Thomas Garrett (Va.) heightened security at a recent town hall in response to death threats.

Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.) described attendees at a town hall in his district last week who booed him down after he said people’s rights are God-given.

“They booed God. They booed the pastor. They booed the prayer. They booed the name of the church. They booed when I said rights come from God,” Brat recounted to The Hill just off the House floor. “That’s a fundamental tenet of western civilization. I mean, I didn’t think that was partisan.”

The evidence that the middle class in America is dying continues to mount.

As you will see below, nearly half the country would be unable “to cover an unexpected $400 expense”, and about two-thirds of the population lives paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time. Of course the economy has not been doing that well overall in recent years. Barack Obama was the only president in all of U.S. history not to have a single year when the economy grew by at least 3 percent, and U.S. GDP growth during the first quarter of 2017 was an anemic 0.7 percent. During the Obama era, it is true that wealthy enclaves in New York, northern California and Washington D.C. did thrive, but meanwhile most of the rest of the country has been left behind.

Nearly eight years into an economic recovery, nearly half of Americans didn’t have enough cash available to cover a $400 emergency. Specifically, the survey found that, in line with what the Fed had disclosed in previous years, 44% of respondents said they wouldn’t be able to cover an unexpected $400 expense like a car repair or medical bill, or would have to borrow money or sell something to meet it.

But just because you can pay your bills does not mean that you are doing well. Tens of millions of Americans barely scrape by from paycheck to paycheck each and every month.

Just as concerning were other findings from the study: just under one-fourth of adults, or 23%, are not able to pay all of their current month’s bills in full while 25% reported skipping medical treatments due to cost in the prior year. Additionally, 28% of adults who haven’t retired yet reported to being grossly unprepared, indicating they had no retirement savings or pension whatsoever.

In fact, a survey by CareerBuilder discovered that 75 percent of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time…

So please don’t be fooled into thinking that the U.S. economy is doing well because the stock market has been hitting new record highs.

Three-quarters of Americans (75 percent) are living paycheck-to-paycheck to make ends meet, according to a survey from CareerBuilder. Thirty-eight percent of employees said they sometimes live paycheck-to-paycheck, 15 percent said they usually do and 23 percent said they always do. While making ends meet is a struggle for many post-recession, those with minimum wage jobs continue to be hit the hardest. Of workers who currently have a minimum wage job or have held one in the past, 66 percent said they couldn’t make ends meet and 50 percent said they had to work more than one job to make it work.

The stock market was soaring just before the financial crisis of 2008 too, and we remember how that turned out.

Just about everywhere you look, businesses are struggling and stores are shutting down. Yes, there are a few wealthy enclaves where everything seems wonderful for the moment, but for most of the country it seems like the last recession never ended.

In a desperate attempt to stay afloat, a lot of families have been turning to debt to make ends meet. U.S. household debt has just hit a brand new all-time record high of 12.7 trillion dollars, but we are starting to see an alarming rise in auto loan defaults and consumer bankruptcies. This is precisely what we would expect to see if the U.S. economy was moving into another major recession.

In fact, we are seeing all sorts of signs that point to a major economic slowdown right now. Just check out the following from Wolf Richter’s latest article…

Over the past five decades, each time commercial and industrial loan balances at US banks shrank or stalled as companies cut back or as banks tightened their lending standards in reaction to the economy they found themselves in, a recession was either already in progress or would start soon. There has been no exception since the 1960s. Last time this happened was during the Financial Crisis.

Now it’s happening again – with a 1990/91 recession twist.

Commercial and industrial loans outstanding fell to $2.095 trillion on May 10, according to the Fed’s Board of Governors weekly report on Friday. That’s down 4.5% from the peak on November 16, 2016. It’s below the level of outstanding C&I loans on October 19. And it marks the 30th week in a row of no growth in C&I loans.

Perhaps we will be very fortunate and break this pattern that has held up all the way back to the 1960s.

But I wouldn’t count on it. Here is what Zero Hedge has to say about this alarming contraction in commercial and industrial loans…

Here’s the bottom line: unless there is a sharp rebound in loan growth in the next 3-6 months – whether due to greater demand or easier supply – this most accurate of leading economic indicators guarantees that a recession is now inevitable.

As Americans, we tend to have such short memories. Every time a new financial bubble starts forming, a lot of people out there start behaving as if it can last indefinitely.

But of course no financial bubble is going to last forever. They all burst eventually, and now the biggest one in U.S. history is about to end in spectacular fashion.

Trump will get a lot of the blame since he is the current occupant of the White House, but the truth is that the conditions for the next crisis have been building up for many years, and the horrors that the U.S. economy is heading for were entirely predictable.

Obama admin knew gang members were part of illegal immigrant surge: Whistleblower

The Obama administration knowingly let in at least 16 admitted MS-13 gang members who arrived at the U.S. as illegal immigrant teenagers in 2014, a top senator said Wednesday, citing internal documents that showed the teens were shipped to juvenile homes throughout the country.

Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said a whistleblower turned over Customs and Border Protection documents from 2014 detailing the 16 persons who were caught crossing the border.

“CBP apprehended them, knew they were MS-13 gang members, and they processed and disbursed them into our communities,” Mr. Johnson, Wisconsin Republican, said.

The gang members were part of the surge of UAC, or “unaccompanied alien children,” as the government labels them, who overwhelmed the Obama administration in 2014, leaving Homeland Security struggling to staunch the flow from Central America.

Officials at the time said the children should be treated as refugees fleeing horrific conditions back home — though security analysts said the children were prime recruiting territory for gangs already in the U.S.

Mr. Johnson said the image of UAC as little children is misleading. Out of nearly 200,000 UAC apprehended between from 2012 to 2016, 68 percent were ages 15, 16 or 17 — meaning older teens.The majority were also male, making them targets for gang recruiting.